Movie Buzz: 'The Perks of Being a Wallflower'

The agony and ecstasy of being a teenager in love, in misery or in trouble is easy enough to spoof, but try treating it with the open-hearted sensitivity and interest it deserves and you're entering a minefield of cliché.

Think "Carrie," "American Graffiti," "Stand By Me," "The Last Picture Show," "Gidget," "How to Stuff a Wild Bikini," and everything by the late, revered John Hughes. If life is tough for teenagers on the screen, it may be tougher for us film goers, forced repeatedly to swallow teenage certainties about the matchless originality of their predicaments, their broken hearts, their dorky parents, their treacherous ex-best friends.

All the more impressive, then, when a filmmaker manages to pull something fiercely fresh out of this played-out soil -- doubly so, when this director is the writer on whose work the film is based.

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Stephen Chbosky, author of the YA bestseller "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" has done just this with a subtle and beguiling film adaptation of his book that may be better than the original.

"Perks" belongs to Charlie a brainy, quiet, conspicuously friendless freshman at a large Pittsburgh high school who takes refuge from his depression (and the recent suicide of his best friend) in an oddball clique of two seniors -- the flamboyant and charismatic Sam, and her stepbrother, the bold-spoken, quip-driven Patrick. The two older kids look after Charlie, and he, in turn, reveres them, but even the tightest of teenage friendships are fraught with peril and misunderstanding.

Demons of unspoken doubt and longing pursue them all.

Logan Lerman, as the pudgy-faced, observant Patrick, has been a pretty boring actor (remember that big dud "Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief"?), but he finds his footing here. And as Sam, Emma Watson (aka Hermione, Harry Potter's big-haired sidekick) shows she can do a whole lot more than earnest, snippy or precocious. But the kid who steals the show is the almond-eyed Ezra Miller, so repellently sociopathic in "We Need to Talk About Kevin," and here, charming, wounded and hilarious, "a kind of teenage Oscar Wilde" (Entertainment Weekly). "He's the one you can't stop watching."

Set in the early '90s, the movie is thrillingly pre-digital, but it doesn't fetishize the past like some retro teen flicks. And the teenage anguish it describes rings true for any era.

"Fans of the book," notes the Atlantic, "have been hoping for years that Chbosky might follow "Perks" with another novel that speaks to them in the same way. Now, they'll just as likely be anticipating his next movie." "Remarkably involving." (Philadelphia Inquirer) "Both painful and elating." (NPR).

The Saratoga Film Forum will show "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" at 7:30 p.m. Thursday and Friday, Dec. 6 and 7, and at 7 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 9, (note time change for this week only) in the Dee Sarno theater in The Arts Center, 320 Broadway, Saratoga Springs. General admission is $7; $5 for students and Film Forum members. Call 584-FILM or go to www.saratogafilmforum.org for more information.